Books from recycled waste celebrated in London’s first Cartonera Book Festival
Thursday 22 August 2019
The first-ever London Cartonera Book Festival will be held from 17 to 20 September as part of a UK-wide festival to celebrate the grassroots ‘Cartonera’ publishers movement from Latin America. For this event, Senate House Library and the University of Surrey and Durham University will join forces with five key publishing collectives from Mexico and Brazil.
Next month, the UK public will have a unique opportunity to join workshops to learn more about the Cartonera publishing movement. It is a phenomenon that was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as a collaboration between writers, publishers, and waste-pickers in the wake of the 2001 economic crisis.
Led by the principles of democracy, inclusivity and equality, ‘cardboard publishers’ make low-cost books out of cardboard collected from the street through community-based workshops. The movement has spread across Latin America and beyond over the past two decades, with cartoneras emerging in more than 20 countries across four continents.
Cultural activists on the front line of the Cartonera scene in Mexico and Brazil will lead a range of workshops. They include Dulcinéia Catadora, a publisher from São Paulo’s Cooperglicerio recycling co-operative, La Rueda Cartonera and Viento Cartonero, whose work has recently been taken to the women’s prison of Puente Grande, Mexico.
Each workshop will give people the opportunity to walk away with their own hand-made Cartonera books and to discuss new ideas for arts-based activism in their own local communities. This kind of work can address problems from environmental degradation to homelessness.
The London Cartonera Book Festival is the culmination of two projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Global Challenges Research Fund: the ‘Cartonera Publishing’ project led by Dr Lucy Bell at Surrey, and ‘Activating the Arts in Latin America’ led by Durham University’s Dr Alex Flynn.
More information and festival workshop details are available on the Senate House Library website.
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Notes for editors
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